November 15, 1998

By STEPHEN J. DUBNER

THERE ONCE WAS A WORLD
A Nine-Hundred-Year Chronicle
of the Shtetl of Eishyshok.By Yaffa Eliach.
Illustrated. 818 pp. Boston:
Little, Brown & Company.
$40; after Dec. 31, $50.

ven before the Holocaust had claimed its final victims, the Jews of Eastern Europe who managed to survive began assembling yizkor (memorial) books, designed to recall the vibrancy of the Jewish life that had been destroyed and to chronicle the destruction itself. They are bittersweet documents: pictures of robust, smiling families juxtaposed with alphabetical lists of the dead.

The act of remembering has since become the most tortured, if necessary, of Jewish pursuits. The torture lies in the delicate balance of acknowledging the extraordinary horror of the killings while mourning the victims, who until the Nazis came to power had led ordinary lives. At the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, there is but one major attempt to commemorate this normal life: the Tower of Life, a three-story exhibit of 1,500 photographs from the shtetl of Eishyshok (the village called Ejszyszki in Polish and Eisiskes in Lithuanian), in what is now Lithuania. They were collected by Yaffa Eliach, an Eishyshok native and Holocaust survivor who emigrated to Palestine with an aunt and uncle in 1946. A member of President Carter's Holocaust Commission, she is a professor in the Judaic studies department of Brooklyn College.

The Tower of Life, as it turns out, was but a shard of Eliach's mission of remembrance, for she has now written ''There Once Was a World,'' an exhaustive and kaleidoscopic history of a town whose 3,500 Jews were nearly all slaughtered either by the Germans, the Lithuanians, the Poles, the Russians or some combination thereof. It is Eliach's own yizkor book, undertaken with a personal ferocity that often magnifies but sometimes impairs her aim.

It would be churlish to voice anything other than admiration for Eliach's determination to reclaim her shtetl. She spent 17 years on the book, traveling to six continents while interviewing survivors, refugees and emigres, gathering documents and photographs, often at great personal expense. ''For one photograph of the market square on market day,'' she writes, ''I paid with a color TV, a VCR, a radio, four jogging suits and four pairs of Reebok sneakers.''

Early on, Eliach lays out the deep history of Eishyshok, ''the Eastern European Jewish equivalent of Podunk.'' The oldest Jewish gravestones dated from 1097; over the centuries the Jews, who became a majority, lived under any number of national governments, some far more tolerant than others, and endured any number of pogroms and anti-Semitic measures. ''The rest of this book,'' Eliach writes at the end of the first section, ''is an account of life before death, of what was lost in the massacre of 1941.''

Situated at a crossroads some 40 miles from Vilna, the town had a thriving market and was known for its brand of sincere but levelheaded piety. Eliach delineates the town's religious and social hierarchies; she relates the custom called ''the delay of the Torah reading,'' whereby a local Jew, perhaps distraught over his inability to get a share of the kosher meat concession (the politics in Eishyshok were very local), would disrupt synagogue services until his grievance was aired. She painstakingly shows how religion began to cede its pride of place: by the 1930's, a typical young Eishyshkian would rather own an automobile than become a Torah scholar.

Eliach's book, containing hundreds of photographs and many patches of oral history, is organized like a textbook (albeit a beautiful one, in the Eastern European tradition), and it sometimes reads like one. Chapters called ''Handicrafts'' and ''Holidays'' and even ''Zionism'' tend to veer toward the generic, which works against the ultraspecific rendering that Eliach is attempting.

But there is a greater conflict at work. As devoutly as Eliach professes her desire to dwell on the life of the town, she is plainly consumed by its death -- and justifiably so: more than 200 of her relatives died with it. Throughout the book, usually in the photo captions, she tells us how each Jew would meet his end. These terse forecasts inadvertently diminish the humanity of the eventual victims by stressing their victimhood over their humanity.

In the book's final 100 pages, titled ''The Bitter End,'' Eliach writes of the killings in gut-churning detail. The massacre took place over two days in September 1941, when she was 4 years old. Her father, Moshe Sonenson, was among the town's most powerful men. Recognizing the Jews' doom, he buried his gold and went into hiding with his wife, Zipporah, and children. They were among the few families to escape, and would spend the rest of the war in desperate straits. At one point, the Sonensons were hiding in a hayloft with several other Jews when a pair of German soldiers approached. Just then, the Sonenson baby began to whimper, and the other Jews threw their coats over him, suffocating him. After liberation, the family returned to Eishyshok, where, Eliach says, Polish soldiers, intent on having a country free of Jews, murdered Zipporah and a second baby son.

Yaffa Eliach's portrayal of these events is heartbreaking and gripping. It is also oddly distanced, for she chose to write in the third person (''Yaffa watched in horror''). This mixture of emotion and seemingly journalistic history is jarring, if understandable: while the stated ambition of her book is to commemorate Eishyshok before the horror, the facts of her own existence would not seem to allow that.

It is, however, worth noting that the book's closing image, a 1983 photograph, is celebratory: Moshe Sonenson in Israel, dancing at the wedding of his granddaughter, Yaffa Eliach's daughter. Having lost faith in both God and man, he still endorsed his daughter's audacious mission, so that ''at least the people, and perhaps even God, will remember that there once was a world filled with faith, Judaism and humanity.''

Stephen J. Dubner is the author of ''Turbulent Souls: A Catholic Son's Return to His Jewish Family.''